Reading Quotes - Page 29

Donâ€™t let me get sappy on you, but when you get right down to it, every collection of letters is a magic spell, even if itâ€™s a moronic proclamation by the Emperor. Words have their impact, girl. Mind your manners. I may not know how to fly but I know how to read, and thatâ€™s almost the same thing.

Gregory Maguire

They say no one reads anymore, but I find that's not the case. Prisoners read. I guess they're not given much access to computers. A felicitous injustice for me. The nicest reader letters I've received â€“ also the only reader letters I've receivedâ€“ have come from prisoners. Maybe we're all prisoners? In our lives, our habits, our relationships?

Rivka Galchen

For a writer it was perhaps most important not to write, but to read. Read as much as you can because in so doing you won't lose yourselves, become unoriginal, what happens is the opposite, by doing this you'll find yourselves. The more you read, the better.

Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

Reading exposes is to the experiences and minds of others, makes us challenge our own provinciality, deepens and widens who we are and what we can become.

Rick Gekoski

If you will read and listen, you will admit a multiplicity of voices and points of view, consider them with some humility, allow them gracious entrance however strident or discordant some of them may sound, then you will grow and change, and each of these voices will become a constituent part of who you become, an atom of growing being. It is literature and only literature than can do this.

Rick Gekoski

...begged them as we read our literary texts, only to listen. To wrench open - it takes an effort of will - the portcullis to their teenage hearts for just a couple of hours once a week, to humbly admit another, and better - a Yeats or Shakespeare, a Crazy Jane or Hamlet - and to welcome them, to allow for those tiny spots of time some vibration in the jelly of being, that makes, once it has settled, a subtle new mould... Otherwise, I would observe tartly...you are merely going to become a product of your family, the few friends you might make and the few lovers you may garner...nothing more than a function of your upbringing - a type. Whereas, if you will only read, and listen, you will admit a multiplicity of voices and points of view, consider them with some humility, allow them gracious entrance however strident or discordant some of them may sound, then you will grow and change, and each of these voices will become a constituent part of who you become, an atom of growing being. It is literature and only literature than can do this.

Rick Gekoski

I canâ€™t get past one or two pages at a time.â€™ â€˜Thatâ€™s how itâ€™s supposed to be read. Sipped like a soothing cup of tea.

Sadeqa Johnson

From Tudor to eighteenth-century England, there are many instances of women writers with no place or room of their own. The life-story of the play-wright Elizabeth Cary, Lady Falkland (1585-1639) gives us a dramatic and, lately, much-studied example. In the hagiographical 'The Lady Falkland: Her Life', written by one of her daughters, we hear how the prodigious Elizabethlearnt to read very soon and loved it much... Without a teacher, whilst she was a child, she learnt French, Spanish, Italian [and] Latin... She having neither brother nor sister, nor other companion of her age, spent her whole time in reading; to which she gave herself so much that she frequently read all night; so as her mother was fain to forbid her servants to let her have candles, which command they turned to their own profit, and let themselves be hired by her to let her have them, selling them to her at half a crown apiece, so was she bent to reading; and she not having money so free, was to owe it them, and in this fashion was she in debt a hundred pound afore she was twelve year old.

Hermione Lee

I'd decided to establish a new rule for myself: read for half an hour an evening, no matter what.

Zadie Smith

Even if readers claim that they 'take it all with a grain of salt', they do not really. They yearn to believe, and they believe, because believing is easier than disbelieving, and because anything which is written down is likely to be 'true in a way'.

Iris Murdoch

(She) could have read for hours, except that recently she had discovered holes and crevices between the words which she immediately had to fill with her own ideas until she was fed up with patching up the makeshift constructs.

Gerhard Amanshauser

Literacy is a fundamental life skill, one that serves as a portal to knowledge and a lifetime of opportunity.

Story Shares

I gave Henry a supscription [sic] to the Book of the Month club that tells you the book you have to read every month to make your individuality stand out. And it really is remarkable, because it makes over 50,000 people read the same book every month.

Anita Loos

Didn't you read the owner's ma

Jim Butcher

Above all, readers want useful information, whether from a road sign or an investment guide. This motive is not completely absent even in readers of fiction, although few people read Madame Bovary for straightforward advice on how not to run a marriage. At a more abstract level, readers want a narrative that makes the world seem to make sense, and they sometimes choose stories that fit with their worldview rather than stories that fit the facts.

Alice W. Flaherty

I see what I did not see. I experience that which is outside my own experience. This is the magic of reading novels. This is the working out of the problem of illusion. I take a book off the shelf. I open it up and begin to read, and what I discover in its pages is real.

Siri Hustvedt

His granny taught him to read, see. I reckon it overheated his mind.

Terry Pratchett

When you read mistakes, learn from it!

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Remember, when we're lost in a story, we're not passively reading about something that's happening to someone else.

Lisa Cron

Reading is dreaming with eyes wide open

Unknown

In the great tradition of Paris Is Burning, bring out your library cards! Because reading is what? Fundamental!

RuPaul

Language and hearing are seated in the cerebral cortex, the folded gray matter that covers the first couple of millimeters of the outer brain like wrapping paper. When one experiences silence, absent even reading, the cerebral cortex typically rests. Meanwhile, deeper and more ancient brain structures seem to be activated--the subcortical zones. People who live busy, noisy lives are rarely granted access to these areas. Silence, it appears, is not the opposite of sound. It is another world altogether, literally offering a deeper level of thought, a journey to the bedrock of the self.

Michael Finkel

I always used to read aloud to her in the evenings--

Cornelia Funke

I do not think that life has any joy to offer so complete, so soul-filling as that which comes upon the imaginative lad, whose spare time is limited, but who is able to snuggle down into a corner with his book, knowing that the next hour is all his own. And how vivid and fresh it all is!

Arthur Conan Doyle

She sighed once, wishing she had a talent for the details of telling stories. She wasn't bad at themes, she mused, but she could never figure out how to turn a theme into an engaging tale. So she read instead, and admired those who could.

Nora Roberts

Storytellers are master manipulators transforming non-reality (grounded in reality) into vicarious experience.

Kevin Focke

In essence , games are the only universally serious activity . They leave no room for skepticism , wouldn't you agree ? However incredulous or doubting you might be , if you want to play , you have no choice but to follow the rules . Only the person who respects the rules , or at least knows and applies them , can win . Reading a book is the same : you have to accept the plot and the characters to enjoy the story .

Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Story of civilization starts with reading, and story of creativity starts with writing

Maryam Abdullah Alnaymi

Mom is a compulsive reader. She reads for pleasure, she reads to edify herself, but more often than not, she reads because she can't help it. I understand. The minute I find myself sitting still, I start rummaging around for printed material.p 97

Michael Perry

The logic: Reading is a private pursuit, one that often takes place behind closed doors. A young lady might retreat with a book, might even take it into her boudoir, and there, reclining on here silken sheets, imbibing the thrills and chills manufactured by writerly quills, one of her hands, one not absolutely needed to grip the little volume, might wander. The fear, in short, as one-handed reading. [p. 146]

Siri Hustvedt

[When asked about Writing Conferences]"You meet people that will change your life.

Susan Wingate

Idleness is the enemy of the soul; and therefore the brethren ought to be employed in manual labor at certain times, at others, in devout reading.

Benedict of Nursia

There are forces working in the world as never before in the history of mankind for standardization, for the regimentation of us all, or what I like to call making muffins of us, muffins all like every other muffin in the muffin tin. This is the limited universe, the drying dissipating universe that we can help our children to avoid by providing them with ‘explosive material capable of stirring up fresh life endlessly'.

Madeleine L'Engle

The man who is fond of books is usually a man of lofty thought, and elevated opinions.

Christopher Henry Dawson

We've inherited many ideas about writing that emerged in the eighteenth century, especially an interest in literature as both an expression and an exploration of the self. This development part of what distinguishes the "modern" from the "early modern" has shaped the work of many of our most celebrated authors, whose personal experiences indelibly and visibly mark their writing. It's fair to say that the fiction and poetry of many of the finest writers of the past century or so and I'm thinking here of Conrad, Proust, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, Plath, Ellison, Lowell, Sexton, Roth, and Coetzee, to name but a few have been deeply autobiographical. The link between the life and the work is one of the things we're curious about and look for when we pick up the latest book by a favorite author.

James Shapiro

I read a lot of books. Here are the books I'm using for my 9/11 project. [Wright gestures to three six-foot-long shelves of books.] As I read them I highlight certain passages. Then I have an assistant write down each quote on an index card and note where it came from.

Lawrence Wright

In our land of opportunities and distractions, it's hard to devote our attention to the quiet pleasures of reading. It's as if we live our lives in a noisy restaurant and can't have the intimate conversation we most yearn for.

Steve Leveen

Enjoy the read!

Kirstin van Dyke

I was too much of a Bronx kid to read Emerson or Hawthorne.

Don DeLillo

Each of us promenades his thought, like a monkey on a leash. When you read, you always have to such monkeys: your own and one belonging to someone else. Or, even worse, a monkey and a hyena. Now, consider what you will feed them. For a hyena does not eat the same things as a monkey...

Milorad Pavić

Literature for me was a magnificent destiny for which I was not yet fully prepared. 76

Anita Brookner

That life can be a rich place, comprised of the highbrow and the lowdown, the casual and the ambitious, private reading and public sharing. As a parent in that landscape, you'll need to be sometimes traveling companion, sometimes guides, sometimes off in your own part of the forest. A relationship between readers is complicated and cannot be reduced to such "strategies" as mandatory reading aloud, a commendable family activity whose pleasure has been codified into virtue, transforming the nightly bedtime story into a harbinger of everybody's favorite thing: homework.

Roger Sutton

We only pass this way once..unless our significant other is reading the map..

k.j. force

Colleges should offer lots of optional life-enriching experiences, like intramural basketball and a place to sunbathe. But reading books, like basketball or sunbathing, is a leisure activity, neither more nor less admirable than any other, and colleges should not pretend otherwise.

Steven E. Landsburg

an incredibly beautiful read

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Dave and Serge...played the Fiddler's Elbow as if it were Giants Stadium, and even though it was acoustic, they just about blew the place up. They were standing on chairs adn lying on the floor, they were funny, they charmed everyone in the pub apart from an old drunk ditting next to the drum kit...who put his fingers firmly in his ears during Serge's extended harmonica solo. It was utterly bizarre and very moving: most musicians wouldn't have bothered turning up, let alone almost killing themselves. And I was reminded...how rarely one feels included in a live show. Usually you watch, and listen, and drift off, and the band plays well or doesn't and it doesn't matter much either way. It can actually be a very lonely experience. But I felt a part of the music, and a part of the people I'd gone with, and, to cut this short before the encores, I didn't want to read for about a fortnight afterward. I wanted to write, but I didn't want to read no book. I was too itchy, too energized, and if young people feel like that every night of the week, then, yes, literature 's dead as a dodo.(Nick's thoughts after seeing Marah at a little pub called Fiddler's Elbow.)

Nick Hornby

I am charmed by the idea that there is an activity known as work and another as play, although even in grade school the distinction eluded me. I remember how full of hope I was sitting in first-period home room listening to the teacher divide up our activities into purposeful sections. I got a grip on her process, at last, by picturing it in the following way: A cow stands in clover. When she is milked, that is her work; when she is merely eating, that is her play. But the problem lay, then as now, in the realization that, in any case, she is standing in clover. Not a handsome or elegant analogy, but it approximates for me the habit of reading - standing in a world of clover, the eating of which is occasionally utilitarian, usually nourishing, because that's what one does

Toni Morrison

...we could think or feel as we wished toward the characters, or as the poet, discounting history, invited us to; we were the poet's guest, his world was his own kingdom, reached, as one of the poems told us, through the 'Ring of Words'...

Janet Frame

I am ashamed to say this, but as a child, neither my parents not my teachers pushed me to read. In fact, I did not read an entire book through until I was a grown man and had learned the awesome power of reading on my own.

Daniel Whyte III

For her, reading was directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths…

Roberto Bolaño

If you cannot find yourself on the page very early in life, you will go looking for yourself in all the wrong places.

Richard Peck

My mother used to read to me every night when I was little. We got through most of the major fantasy books of that time. The Narnia books by C.S. Lewis were my favorites and, later, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. I started making dolls to fill in the gaps of the dolls I had. Obviously we couldn't buy centaurs and fauns and elves and fairies, so I made them to play with the normal dolls I had. I must have been about six years old when I started making fantasy dolls.

Wendy Froud

To read, even in the half-dark, is also to call the lost forward.

Gregory Maguire

Novels and gardens," she says. "I like to move from plot to plot.

Bill Richardson

But editors are still the world's readers. And thus the eyes of the world.

Betsy Lerner

I don't know what's more tragic, knowing how to read and choosing not to, or not knowing how to read and refusing to learn.

Patricia Goldbach

Wide reading is important. You don’t have to like it, but it’s important to grapple with things you don’t understand. I’ve been spending the last six months getting up an hour early to try to understand economics because I need to. I don’t want to be one of these bewildered schmucks. The things that you understand will inform your writing. The bigger your mind, the better your work is going to be. You’re not born with a big mind; you have to build it. If I don’t read for an hour a day, I get ill.

Jeanette Winterson

So go ahead. Do it—open the book. See? You see me, right? And I see you. See? I am reading your face, your eyes, your lips. I know the sufferdust on your brow. I can see you reading and I can tell, too, when you are here, when you’re absent, what you’ve read and how it affects you. There is no more hiding. I see your chords—your fractures, your cold gifts, where and when you’ve hurt people and why. It’s all right there—your stories are written right there on your face!

Christopher Boucher

Bean felt a rush of sweet nostalgia for the woman who had introduced us to E. Nesbit and Edward Eager and Laura Ingalls Wilder...

Eleanor Brown

Doom is nigh. I am in acute distress, desperately trying to coax sleep, opening my eyes every few seconds to check their faded gleam, and imagining paradise as a place where a sleepless neighbor reads an endless book by the light of an eternal candle.

Vladimir Nabokov

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Reading Quotes - Page 29

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